Wire Thread

Dramatic developments indeed last night, as Stringer Bell turns out on several fronts not to be nearly as clever as he thought. One correspondent has speculated to me that this may mean we're watching the final season of The Wire, though my understanding is that the HBO people haven't yet decided whether or not to make a fourth season. Certainly, it strikes me that we're seeing a nice setup for a season four focused on Congressman Carcetti's race for mayor, which hasn't yet really emerged. Indeed, it's striking that with only one episode left in season three how tenuous the linkages are between some of the major narrative threads. Carcetti connects to the Daniels unit through Theresa D'Agostino and both Carcetti and Bell have had some contact with Major Colvin, but there's a great deal of distance between all of these.

Assuming that that stuff won't shake out next week, there's still the small matter of Prez's shooting that other cop, which still hasn't gotten any play. Bell's murder, meanwhile, is bound to drop onto someone's desk on the homicide unit. Omar, in a rather odd play, left a witness -- the contractor -- alive to walk away from the scene. McNulty and several other members of the Major Case Unit should be able to easily identify Omar as the perpetrator based on a very minimal description of the scarred face and shotgun. There was also that odd scene with Bubble's former partner in street life which seems to raise the prospect that everyone's favorite CI will be outed.

For my money, the one-episode breakdown of Stringer's world ranks as one of the great episodes of the series. From Bell's tete-a-tete with Levy in which he discovers that he's not nearly the master of the "game beyond the game" that he thought, to the Bell-Barksdale-Slim conversation about the wisdom of offing a State Senator, right down to his bravado of the final seconds of his life . . . priceless.